Salesforce Architecture: Understanding the Fundamentals

Prakash Kolhe
Cymetrix Software
Published in
3 min readApr 27, 2023
Salesforce Architecture: Understanding the Fundamentals

Salesforce Architecture is a crucial aspect of the Salesforce platform, and understanding its fundamentals is essential for building effective solutions. Understanding the multiple levels of Salesforce Architecture and its customization choices will help you make and deploy scalable, high-performance solutions that match your business goals, whether you are a Salesforce administrator, developer, or user. Now, we will provide an overview of Salesforce Architecture and discuss the different layers of this platform. We will also explore the primary customization options and provide best practices for ensuring scalability and performance. By the end of this post, you should have a better understanding of Salesforce Architecture and knowledge to build effective solutions on the platform.

Layers of Salesforce Architecture

The Presentation, Logic, and Data Layers make up the Salesforce Architecture. Understanding each layer is crucial for designing and implementing robust solutions on the platform.

Presentation Layer

The Presentation Layer is responsible for rendering the user interface that users interact with. It includes components like Visualforce pages and Lightning Components. These components help create a custom user interface to meet your organization’s needs.

Logic Layer

This layer is responsible for processing data and applying business logic to it. Logic Layer includes Apex, a programming language that helps build custom functionality within the Salesforce platform. The Logic Layer also includes workflows, approval processes, and validation rules, which can help automate business processes and enforce data integrity.

Data Layer

It is responsible for storing and managing data within Salesforce. This layer includes the Salesforce data model, which consists of objects and relationships between them. The Data Layer also includes the Salesforce database architecture, designed to handle large volumes of data.

Each layer of Salesforce Architecture is interdependent and works together to provide a comprehensive solution for managing customer data and automating business processes. As you design and implement solutions on the platform, it is crucial to consider how changes in one layer may impact the other layers and to ensure your solution is scalable and performant.

Understanding Customization in Salesforce Architecture

Salesforce provides various customization options that allow you to tailor the platform to meet unique organizational needs. These customization options include custom fields, objects, relationships, record types, page layouts, formula fields, and roll-up summary fields.

It’s crucial to make sure Salesforce customizations are scalable and don’t affect performance negatively. Furthermore, to achieve this, it is necessary to follow best practices such as limiting the usage of formula fields and roll-up summary fields, avoiding excessive validation rules and workflows, and optimizing page layouts to minimize the number of displayed fields.

Considerations for Scalability and Performance

As your organization grows and your data volume increases, it is crucial to ensure Salesforce solution remains scalable and performant. Moreover, it is essential to design your solution with scalability in mind from the outset to achieve this. That includes considerations such as developing custom objects and fields that can be easily expanded as needed and avoiding hard-coded values in Apex code.

In addition, it’s crucial to keep an eye on your data volume and have data archiving or data purging techniques in place to ensure good performance in Salesforce. You can optimize performance by leveraging indexing and utilizing caching mechanisms in Salesforce. It is also critical to check your code regularly and optimize it for performance.

By following best practices for customization and scalability, you can ensure that your Salesforce solution remains performant and can meet organizational needs as it grows.

Conclusion

In conclusion, understanding the fundamentals of Salesforce Architecture is crucial for building effective solutions on the platform. The different layers of Salesforce Architecture work together to provide a comprehensive solution for managing customer data and automating business processes.

At Cymetrix, we specialize in providing Salesforce consulting and implementation services to help organizations achieve their business goals. Our team of experts has a deep understanding of Salesforce Architecture and can help you design and implement customized solutions to meet your organizational needs. Contact us today to learn how we can help you leverage the full potential of Salesforce to drive business success.

--

--